


bury a friend

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Joseph Kavinsky is His Own Warning, Joseph kavinsky murder hoe: the prequel, M/M, No Smut, Pre-Canon, if you never buried a body together are you REALLY bffs, intentionally vague cause of death, plot without porn, the origin of the dream pack, the world may never know, was it an accident? was it intentional?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:15:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23782216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: Prokopenko dies at the beginning.(AKA, the origin of the Dream Pack.)
Relationships: Joseph Kavinsky/Prokopenko, pre Jiang/Joseph Kavinsky/Prokopenko/Skov/Swan
Comments: 8
Kudos: 39





	bury a friend

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, no porn.

_ they don’t know about us _

_ the world’s asleep when we play _

_ *** _

The morning Joseph Kavinsky wakes up next to a corpse is the morning that Joseph Kavinsky finally relinquishes his tenuous hold on morality, on mortality. 

In short: Joseph Kavinsky goes from  _ mildly fucked-up freak of nature _ to  _ unhinged megalomaniacal chthonic god  _ in the span of just a few seconds, a quiet transformation after years of straw being heaped onto the metaphorical camel’s back. 

Prokopenko dies that night, yes, but Joseph Kavinsky dies that morning. 

They are both of them screaming boys replaced by quiet monsters. 

***

“Fuck fuck fuck.” Skov whispered, over and over, eyes bloodshot, pacing back and forth in the narrow aisle between his twin bed and Proko’s, long legs and agitation and gritted teeth. He was a nervous boy. Nervous and shaky and prone to acne. Always aching to be  _ perfect, _ with dozens of different brands of concealer hidden in his heirloom leather Dopp kit. 

K, because that’s how he thought of himself now, didn't know Skov all that well. Just knew what he’d gleaned from a few weeks of living in each others’ pockets, all five of them. He knew Proko from the first— knew him from around, from the parochial middle school they’d attended in Jersey, Bishop Eustace’s. 

Proko was the son, or grandson, or nephew,  _ something  _ of one of K’s father’s dead made men. 

K’s father liked to breed greyhounds from gutter mutts in that way— liked to send the orphaned unfortunates of their community to school, gambling on a bet that they’d make something of themselves and remember where they’d come from, who they owed. Even if they didn’t make something of themselves, they still remembered who’d given them a shot. 

He’d discounted Proko at BE, but here he’d distinguished himself as being half a foot taller and eager to serve, to fall back at K’s command. 

(And so  _ what  _ if he’d turned scarlet in the cheeks when Proko laughed? If he’d had dreams about Proko’s stupid pink mouth? It was only hormones. It wasn’t  _ anything.)  _

“I gotta—  _ we _ gotta call the cops. Or the dean. Or our parents.  _ Fuck!  _ We’re fucked. We’re  _ fucked.”  _ Skov scrubbed his trembling hands over his face. 

K stroked his fingers idly through Proko’s hair. 

“What if I could give you everything you ever wanted?” K asked calmly, hearing his own voice as if from far away, locked inside this cool-faced body whose heart didn’t race and whose gag reflex didn’t appear even when it felt how cold Proko’s skin had gotten, how pale. How he was starting to  _ smell,  _ over the usual male dormitory stench of stale weed and sweaty gym socks. 

Skov’s breathing, which had gone shallow, stopped altogether in his surprise. His cerulean eyes narrowed. Suspicion hung over his hysteria like a science experiment in emotional density. 

“Money won’t do shit for me in  _ prison!”  _ He hissed, voice cracking ungainfully. He was gangly and juvenile and  _ frightened,  _ desperate. Skov’s father had a seat in the House and Skov had a corpse in his room. 

K knew just what to say, then, though he’d never before been much for words. They came naturally now, the way they came naturally to his father, spilling from his mouth like molten silver.

“Not money.” K said, low, and he could not see his own face but it was beatific, beautiful, like a renaissance painting of Lucifer. He was the Morningstar. He was the snake in the Garden. Offering Skov an escape; offering him an apple. “Something else.  _ Everything  _ else.” 

Skov was frightened, and fourteen, and searching for an exit. A solution. 

He was looking for  _ magic.  _

K’s eyes glinted, black as pitch. 

He was magic. 

Skov sniffed hard, trying to be  _ anything _ but a sniveling brat. He looked from K’s eyes to Proko’s, milky and  _ staring,  _ open, his head resting in K’s lap. 

He nodded. 

***

There was a rug in their room— Proko and Skov’s. It was big, and Skov had to hold up either narrow single bed while K pulled it out from under, maneuvering around the room as quietly as they could. Maneuvering  _ Proko  _ as quietly as they could, his limbs gone stiff and oddly slick as they picked him up and rolled him up in the displaced carpet like something out of a bad gangster movie. 

His feet stuck out the end, skinny and pale and bare, toenails gone bluish-purple. That seemed to disturb Skov more than anything else— the stained sheets, the utter eerie calmness of K, the looming dread of discovery, none of it worse than Proko’s exposed, oddly-vulnerable feet. 

There was a knock at the door- Swan and Jiang, appearing from across the hall as if they’d been summoned to the gallows and not texted  _ 911 911 911  _ from Proko’s cheap burner phone. 

Skov and K stood obscuring Proko’s feet. Swan closed the door behind them, slowly, like he could taste the danger in the air. 

“If you help us,” K said slowly, making sure they understood every word before he gave Skov the nod to move, to expose what they’d done. “I’ll give you the whole fucking world.”  _ I mean it,  _ his eyes said.  _ I can do it, too.  _

They didn’t jump when they saw Proko’s feet sticking out from the carpet burrito, when they registered what it was they were seeing. They were both of them less jumpy than Skov, and K was sure that they’d both seen more corpses than a pimply fourteen-year-old from Connecticut. Like knew like, and K had known Swan and Jiang from the first time he’d laid eyes upon them. 

“We need a truck.” K told them, disrupting the hushed, contemplative silence before they had the chance to really understand what it was they were being asked to do. What they were being offered. Keeping them off balance was better for him; creating an atmosphere where everything seemed reasonable was even better. “And a distraction.” 

Still he sounded calm, felt calm, felt like he was getting smaller and smaller inside his body, like his skin was as thick as the Great Wall of China and nothing could touch him ever again. The name  _ Joseph  _ had floated away from him, uncatchable, a grocery store balloon slipping out the backseat window on the way back home. Never to be returned. 

He was _K._

He was so cold. 

“Okay.” Jiang said. 

“Yeah.” Swan agreed, almost at the same time. 

***

Proko hadn’t been so heavy when he was alive, K was sure, as he and Skov hurried through the emptied-out halls with their burden, the fire alarm screaming and the sprinklers on in full force, plastering their hair to their skin, their shirts to the tops of their shoulders. They were going the opposite direction of their evacuated peers- towards the service exit. Jiang had set the fire on the opposite side of the dormitory; Swan had parked the  _ borrowed  _ pickup at the service entrance, where there were no security cameras. 

Ideally, he’d have done this with only Skov. The less bribery and morally-conflicted rich boy consciences to deal with in these sort of situations, the better, but it was a four man job. Four men to dispose of the fifth, and that was almost funny, in a way that K registered dimly but couldn’t imagine being able to laugh at. 

Laughter was far away; tears were even further. 

There was nothing but the weight of Proko’s body in the stolen rug and the hollow  _ thud  _ it made when he and Skov tossed it into the bed of the truck, hurrying around to squeeze into the cab with Jiang and Swan, who drove through the darkened Henrietta streets with the headlights off and his caramel hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. 

It was so  _ dark  _ here. Darker than anywhere else K had ever been, in these mountains where there were no skyscrapers, no highrises, no light pollution to disguise the staggering emptiness of the night, the horrible vastness of space. 

He’d always felt small, looking out at the stars. 

He didn’t feel that way now; he felt like he could swallow those stars. He felt like he could burn the whole fucking world down. 

He felt like he was going to live forever, buried so deep in his skinsuit that nothing could ever touch him, could ever get him back out. 

He’d like to try it. Like to see what could hurt him, what could touch him now. Find out what could turn him into a glassy-eyed slab of rapidly-deteriorating flesh, like Proko in the back. Find out if  _ anything  _ could. 

They carried the rug-wrapped corpse  _ (Ilya Prokopenko, son, friend, faithful watchdog)  _ deep into the woods. Into the hills. Until Jiang murmured about getting lost. Until they found a clearing big enough, flat enough, for their purpose. 

“We didn’t bring any shovels.” Skov whispered, like  _ that  _ was the thing that was gonna make him cry. 

“Use your hands.” Swan said shortly, and then they were all digging, breaking their short nails, breathing heavily with the endless effort of it, shifting through fallen leaves and bugs and rocks to make the hole.  _ Six feet deep,  _ K knew it had to be. Shallow graves were too easily-discoverable. 

His fingers were bleeding, when they put Proko into the hole, still-wrapped-up. K regretted that; he wanted to see Proko’s face. Wanted to see how it had changed in the hours that it had taken them to pull this off, hours he’d spent concealed in the rug until it was dark enough to execute their plan. 

Filling the hole back in was infinitely easier than digging it had been, a gentler job. Like tucking in a small child, though K had no younger siblings and therefore had no frame of reference for such a thing. 

K was exhausted; it made everything easier. 

He laid down on top of the burial mound, on top of the grave, another layer of covering for Proko’s corpse. 

“We’ve got to go, Joseph.” Swan told him, urgency in his voice, the posh public school accent he only used when he wasn’t trying so hard to be  _ hard,  _ with his put-on London alley rat dialect. He was just another scrawny British rich boy, a common enough feature of Aglionby’s student body, but he wanted to be  _ more.  _ Wanted to be tough, wanted to hide his privilege, wanted to swagger and sneer like he’d been born and raised in Westminster, not come up with a silver spoon jammed so far down his throat he shat shillings. 

He was like Skov-  _ desperate.  _ He was easy. 

Jiang was silent; he was watching, taking in the sight of K laid out like a sacrifice upon the ground. 

He was harder. 

“What do you want?” K asked Jiang, folding his filthy, injured hands over his stomach. 

Jiang was silent, contemplative. He thought. He  _ considered.  _ He was a man, already, it seemed- tall and lean and with an ageless sort of face. He had a great haircut. He moved like he owned everything, or else could buy it. In cash. 

“To belong.” Jiang finally decided upon, intentionally vague. It made the small, interior part of K uneasy, because he could not give Jiang something that he himself did not even possess. 

“You’ll belong with me.” He finally settled upon promising. “At my right hand.” Vainglorious, K was, and self-important, but it seemed that Jiang was satisfied by his words, enough to wait to see if they’d be backed up by his deeds. 

K closed his eyes, and breathed, and listened to the sounds of the forest all around him, the rustling of birds’ wings and the too-loud breathing of his companions and the wind whispering through the cold-stiffened leaves, ready to fall from their branches, withered. 

K dreamt of an endless city, streets that never seemed to cease, blocks all the same, buildings all the same, everything in grayscale. Everything empty, and echoing. 

He imagined cars on these streets, bright flashy things ripped from the glossy pages of magazines they shoplifted from the 7-11 on Second Street, worthy of Paul Walker himself. He imagined empty, open stores full of pills, part pharmacy and part pick-and-mix candy store. He imagined a world on fire, half  _ Grand Theft Auto _ and half hell, sex and drugs and cars. 

He imagined Prokopenko, and saw him just ahead, standing at the base of a gnarled, enormous tree that had both appeared suddenly and been there the whole time, longer than K had been alive to dream it into existence. 

Proko wore his Aglionby uniform, except his feet were bare. He was waiting for K with the same expectant expression he wore whenever he waited outside of Halloway’s Geography class for K to be finished so they could go eat lunch in the courtyard, eternally early. 

There were two apples hanging from the tree’s branches, just over Proko’s head. 

Proko’s mouth was redder than it had ever been in life, exaggerated just enough to be noticeable. His eyelashes were longer, too, and the way he stood was just… off. Not perfect. Not like a photograph. Like he’d absorbed some of K’s longing, his hormone-fueled teenage lust, and come out of the assembly line like an  _ extremely  _ high-tech blow-up doll. 

“Let’s go,” Proko said, the same way he always did in the hall outside of Holloway’s classroom, except for how his eyes went half-lidded as they caught on K’s lips, swept appreciatively over his numb body. 

“Yeah.” K said, grabbing the apples and jerking his head back the way he’d come, down the endless road, like they could just walk out of the concrete jungle that was his dream and end up in the woods again, twenty miles from Henrietta and surrounded by co-conspirators, accessories after the fact. 

K opened his eyes, waking up. 

“What the  _ fuck.”  _ Skov swore, too-high, freaking out. 

Swan and Jiang made identical noises of surprise, of shock. 

“Here.” K said, offering Swan and Skov an apple each. He was warm, now. Warm and dull down to his marrow. “Eat them.” He instructed, and so they did, with wide eyes fixed on the body curled around K’s, alive and breathing and smirking smugly at them all. 

“Let’s go get burgers.” Proko said, nuzzling K’s throat the way he’d never once done in life. 

K imagined cars and drugs and  _ blood,  _ pouring from his dreams like manna from heaven, like gifts  _ he  _ bestowed. 

He was a god. 

Skov and Swan finished their apples; K imagined them changing, imagined how they’d look when they were through. When they were  _ done.  _

They were in it for the long run, now. 

They were a family. 

They were a  _ pack.  _

***

_ it’s too late to go, it’s getting light out  _

_ i know you don’t wanna sleep here alone  _

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
